A Texas Minute
by Dream Writer 4 Life
Summary: What can happen between the "tick" and the "tock" of a clock; seconds make all the difference. CM 5-03 Challenge entry.


**Title:** A Texas Minute  
**Author:** Dream Writer 4 Life  
**Genre:** Suspense  
**Rating:** PG for one swear and slight subject matter  
**Archived:** , Cover Me, and SD-1. Anywhere else, just ask and you shall receive!  
**Timeline/Spoilers:** None; A/U.  
**'Shippers' Paradise:** Anybody with a guy and a girl with brown eyes. In my opinion, it's S/V. Decide for yourself.  
**Summary:** "There's a New York minute, Chicago minute, Texas minute, LA minute, all with different lengths and meanings and moods." What can happen between the "tick" and the "tock" of a clock. CM 5/03 Challenge entry.  
**Disclaimer:** I own nothing. If you recognize it, I definitely don't own it. The fourth paragraph from the bottom is a poem of mine, but that's all. Actually, I probably don't even need to disclaimer this: I don't mention any names! Muah ha, ha, ha! It's mine! All mine! strokes suspicious-looking gold ring  
**Author's Note:** Hope you like! It's second person POV, my first fic of that kind. Enjoy! And leave reviews/send me feedback! I'd love to know what y'all (honestly) think.

* * *

A Texas Minute

There are a thousand ways to destroy a man, and this, you muse, is but one of them.

Tick—

Freeze.

You've heard all the statistics about what can happen in a single hour, a single minute, a single second: so-and-so number of people are killed by firearms, involved in car crashes, raped, mugged, murdered, infected with AIDS, die from cancer.

There's a New York minute, Chicago minute, Texas minute, LA minute, all with different lengths and meanings and moods.

You hope this will pass like a New York minute.

But it's creeping by like a Texas minute.

Damn.

Your stare has grown intense, more so than anything you can recollect. You are trying to read the thoughts of the stunned person in front of you like a psychic, even though you've never really believed in those phony grifters, anyway. The muddy pools mirror your intensity, murky with confusion, indecision engraved into specs of black around her slightly dilated pupils. Even her blood vessels seem to etiolate to white, sending all available blood to her brain in order to answer your question.

Unspoken questions, unspoken feelings, unspoken attraction…all have plagued this relationship since you two met many years ago. But now everything you've ever felt — ever _thought_ of feeling — has been put out in the open, scribed in poorly written prose for the ages to come to look back upon and laugh at.

You hope she isn't laughing at you behind her neatly kept façade; even now, when the two of you are finally alone, she keeps her vast collection of masks close at hand. Right now she may be cracking, but as soon as this damn Texas minute ends, another mask just might pop up and cover the cracks or fill them in with rubber cement so this situation can never happen again.

God, will this ever end?

Your insides are squirming like they are alive; well, they are, but alive as in the sense that they have their own minds and secret agendas. Your stomach is pitching as violently as a schooner out to sea in a hurricane. You think you are going to be sick. Violently sick. Horribly, painfully, powerfully violently sick. Complete with blood-vessel-popping projectile vomiting violently sick. And there are no protection devices in the immediate vicinity. A fleeting thought flits across your brain: maybe you should warn her to "duck and cover" or "seek shelter" immediately. Nah. She hasn't given you an answer yet.

What difference does that make?

All the difference in the world.

One answer and the crisis is averted, the right wire is cut.

Another and…well, break out the umbrellas, the ponchos, and the Medieval-style shields, 'cause Mount St. Helens might just pop its top once again. Wouldn't that be a party?

Tension in the form of an invisible cloud is thick and dense, suffocating you by pressing down upon your head with the force of an anvil dropped from a skyscraper. You are drowning in a sea of silence, and she is hesitating with the life preserver. You are screaming but the stillness persists, making you feel like a fish out of water, flopping around on a deck in the sun, just waiting for her to throw you back into the waters of reality. The taughtness in the atmosphere is akin to the smog that Los Angeles is known for: poisonous, acidic, corrosive, asphyxiating, destructive, and tricking you into thinking it is harmless because "it's only a cloud". Cloud your ass. You know from experience that looks can be deceiving, and this metaphorical cloud of tension is not fooling you. You want to make it disappear as quickly as possible, but the control is out of your hands now. It is all up to her. Like the severity of your twenty-four-millisecond stomach virus, your ability to breathe is now not under your jurisdiction.

Suddenly you realize that your lungs are burning anyway. The oxygen that you have been unwittingly denying them is glaringly absent, searing your lungs and almost splitting them each into two halves. They are spasming with inactivity and swelling despite the absence of substance, pressing dangerously against your rib cage. (Did one of them just crack?) You didn't know you were holding your breath. It is anticipation, you quickly decide. Everyone goes through it. Everything will be okay soon.

Hopefully.

Damn Texas minutes.

Why does everything have to be so big there?

Then you become aware of a profound thumping, its rhythm matching that of a rogue three-year-old who somehow got hold of a giant bass drum. It is irregular and _loud_, crescendoing and accelerating the longer and more intently you listen. Then it dawns on you: it's your heart, dumb ass! Which doesn't quite make sense: with a lack of oxygen, your pulse is supposed to slow down to accommodate your slacking lungs. But then again…since when have either ever made sense? Just about every time you and she have been normal. And when has that occurred? Never. Exactly. Of course, the two of you make perfect sense to each other; every guarded word and stolen glance is part of an intricate code only you two can decipher. But to the rest of the world…Well, you suppose the rest of the world is yelling, "Get on with it, already! The unresolved sexual tension is just killing us! What are you waiting for? Hell to freeze over?"

Maybe.

Hell just might freeze over if this goes on any longer, you think.

This is killing you, destroying you.

Ha, ha, ha.

Dry laughter all around.

Your hand itches to reach for your earlobe, to yank it off your head in an attempt to make the time pass more quickly and resolve this ordeal. You are nervous. That is what you do when you are nervous. Well, that and wrinkle your forehead like a Pug puppy's face, pinch the bridge of your nose, and massage your temples until your skull caves in. Putting all that aside, you think that the ear-pulling is by far your favourite form of releasing pent-up nervous energy — although, quite possibly your most unattractive; she claims to swoon over the Pug puppy wrinkles that spring up out of nowhere when you are worried about her. But there is no time for any of that at the moment; an answer could roll from her lips at any time now.

Any time now.

Anything can happen in a moment, you muse.

A bird freezes in mid-flight, wings curled up, propelling it farther, harder. A worm snatched it its beak is cemented there, the will to struggle still there against immovable odds. Dust is caught in the shaft of sunlight that it disrupted, gravity suspending it on its invisible strings and casting miniscule shadows on the hardwood floor below. A musician is stuck on one note, one long, steady, unending note, unwavering, non-diminishing, non-escalating, unchanging. Dew is stemmed on the petal of a rose, catching the sunlight and refracting it into a million colours, each different than the next. Each unique. Each brilliant.

Yes, anything can happen in a moment.

Her lips are moving now, parting so slowly that you want to reach over and do it for her.

—Tock.

"Yes."

**_END_**


End file.
